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Comment by neiman | Hacker News Reader

Is there any positive ethical aspect of this tool?

Eliminating information dissymmetry, by showing to the rest of the world what -given the simplicity- undoubtedly many other people have already found out (but have kept for themselves).

For that to hold reasonable ethical weight, you’d need to spread wide awareness of this tool. I’d say you qualify for that if, for example, you were to run this bot in some kind of “warning mode” that would join unprotected groups and let participants know of their danger.

Fair point. At the very least it highlights the security model of OSS in general.

Not a fan of Telegram, but as far I understand this only let's you scrape messages from public channels. People shouldn't really expect anything else when you write a message on a group with 100s of other people

Exactly, and this tool even joins the channel. I mean what else do you expect, it's not a surprise that anyone who joins a channel can read the messages.

Not untrue. And its one ngnix ec2 instance away from silently changing it from anyone who joins a channel to read the message to the world indexing all those messages.

Sure, drawing attention to the weaknesses of Telegram.

Similar discussion from previous HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776327

So what is the weakness here? It just seems to say public channels can be read by anyone, duh.

The README clearly states:

>Potential Business Applications:

>Sock puppeteering to overthrow a despotic regime

>Brand monitoring and sentiment analysis

>Shilling cryptocurrency at a moments notice for financial gain

>Influencing sentiment on topical issues

>Getting in on price action early

>Running analysis of a telegram channel

While some of them are arguably unethical, some of them are almost certainly not.

Some of these applications were intended to be tongue in cheek and point out ethical applications were up to the imagination.

Gathering intelligence on - and data from - bad actors.

Do a search for "site:telegram.me" including a keyword from any illegal activity, such as carding, and you'll find hundreds of channels with interesting behavior.

I mean, it's a bot. Like a search engine bot. It works only for public groups or if it's allowed in a group...

I don't see any negative ethical aspect to be honest.

The easiest negative ethical aspect I would point out is in chat apps like discord or TG we have a reasonable expectation of privacy that is not necessarily implicit in the APIs. It could be one ec2 free-tier instance away from making all that information indexable.

Depends who you think should be able to bomb people based on metadata I guess.

It's all relative.

> We Kill People Based on Metadata

Former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden

Keeping an eye on cryptocurrency scammer channels?

Exposing fundamental architectural flaws of Telegram?

Public groups being publicly accessible is an architectural flaw?

The ability to autoscale accounts with the generation of "real" phone numbers breaks the model

It's not. You could also mass surveil HN since it's public.

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